This chapter suggests that since in premodern states class usually trumped ethnicity (thesis2), there was little ethnic cleansing (thesis1). Though mass murders are obviously not new to human history, few earlier historical regimes intended to wipe out or expel whole civilian populations. Con- querors normally wanted people to rule over; they wanted to subordinate and enslave them, not remove them. Yet some disagree, declaring that murderous cleansing is equally ancient and modern, citing the notorious Assyrians or in- cidents like the Carthaginian destruction of Greek city-states and the Roman destruction of Numantia and Carthage (Chalk & Jonassohn,1990; du Preez, 1994:4–5; Freeman,1995; Jonasson,1998: chap.17). Smith (1997) declares that “Genocide has existed in all periods of history,” though he distinguishes different types – conquest, religious, colonial, and modern genocide – in dif- ferent historical eras.
No age has had a monopoly on mass murder. Earlier ages may have been far more cruel than our own, more at ease, for example, with public torture and executions. We moderns prefer indirect, callous killing at a distance. We bomb from a safe height but are appalled by butchery with axes and swords (Collins,1974:421). In former times treatment of the lower classes, including common soldiers, was much crueler than it is today. Discipline was harsh and exemplary, floggings were routine, executions were common. The enemy’s lower classes were treated even worse. Armies lived off the countryside;
besiegers sacked, looted, and raped their way through a captured city. But in historic warfare, notes Smith (1997) people were killed forwhere, not whothey were. Murder is not distinctively modern, but murder in order to cleanse particular identities is modern.
Even with cleansing, I must qualify this statement. Migrant conquerors who aim to settle and farm or herd the land themselves have strong eco- nomic motivations to displace the natives from the land and may engage in wild deportations, worsening to ethnocide if expelling them results in starvation. In a few cases this may have amounted to local genocide, as with some Hun, Mongol, and Anglo-Saxon incursions. If incursions were by pastoralists into settled land, the native death rate might have been high, since pastoralists need more extensive lands than farmers. Yet most ancient mass movements conventionally described as conquests were very different.
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The Indo-Europeans (from whose language almost all European languages are descended) probably spread westward not through conquest at all, but through a centuries’-long process diffusing advanced neolithic farming. No one, concludes Renfrew (1992), may have actually moved more than a few miles. Most supposed conquerors of early history actually rose to power gradually. Dolukhanov (1994: 374) says that Middle Eastern Semites first appeared as migrant pastoralists living alongside sedentary agriculturalists.
They adopted much of the agriculturalists’ culture, entering their cities as la- borers, mercenaries, and merchants. Eventually, they rose up and conquered them. Later they founded great empires – Akkadian, Hittite, and so on – ruling over, not eliminating, the agriculturalists.
We know most about more recent invaders, like the barbarians conquer- ing the Roman Empire. The Visigothic conquerors of the Garonne Valley in southern France may have been typical. They constituted only one-sixth of the native population of the valley. Brown (1996:57–62) says they were not perceived as “invaders from outer space” but as known neighbors, often previously engaged in defending the empire from other invaders. They re- cruited Roman renegades, poor people seeking to better themselves through violence. Except “for the occasional, chilling grand raid” (like Attila the Hun’s), which might be quite devastating, they would set about “spoiling the meadows, cutting up the countryside and ruining the olive groves” as a way of forcing submission. Resisters were cut down, women were raped, and further deaths came from malnutrition and disease. The “aim was to inflict just enough damage to persuade the local leaders to think twice about offer- ing further resistance: they would pay tribute or open their gates to a new overlord.” The Goths didn’t want to cleanse civilized peoples, they wanted tobecivilized. King Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, summed it up: “An effective Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would want to be a Goth.” He was describinglateral assimilation, confined within comparable social classes of the two peoples. Upper-class Goths become Romans; some lower-class Romans had become Goths. Mongols and Chinese did the same during weaker periods of the Chinese Empire. These barbarians practicedex- emplary repressionfollowed bypartial class assimilation, not cleansing. This was probably the most common pattern where barbarians conquered more civilized peoples. And as they conquered, they assimilated more peoples into their culture and identity. By the time the heirs of Ghenghis Khan reached the Middle East, the conquering “Mongol” armies were mostly composed of Turkic soldiers picked up along the way. The ensuing Khanate was ethnically extremely mixed – and converted to Islam.
Since civilization was all about avoiding labor (it still is), barbarians wanted people to rule over, do the work, and create the surplus. If they killed them, they would have to do the labor themselves. At the extreme, they might kill or deport entire troublesome elites or defiant cities or local populations. Cities put to the sword might result in thousands of deaths,
as in Numantia and the two Greek city-states mentioned earlier. They were made an example of. But conquerors assimilated elites who did submit. Since most empires and barbarians conquered their near neighbors, they did not regard them as aliens. The ferocity of ancient conquerors was intended to send an exemplary signal to other cities and regions to surrender; it did not commence more systematic elimination.
Most historic cities were very cosmopolitan, containing ethnic and reli- gious tensions leading to riots. At the worst this might escalate to pogroms;
wild, short-lived violence directed at a minority might also result from com- munal tensions and rulers’ divide-and-rule strategies. Nero’s scapegoating of Christians for the great fire of Rome and attacks on Jews in the European Middle Ages are obvious examples. Warfare occasionally strayed, as it still does, into ethnocide. Laying waste territory, burning crops and homes, and killing animals result in mass civilian deaths, callously regarded as an accept- able cost. Anger, revenge, panic, drunkenness, or paranoia shown by some rulers (Attila, Timur, or Ivan the Terrible seem obvious examples) might in- tensify the horrors. The extreme cases were deplored at the time. It is not true, as Smith (1997:232) suggests, that such acts have produced “a sense of moral horror” only in modern times.
Rome had struggled for a century against Carthage. By the time Rome was getting the upper hand, feelings of revenge were strong. The policy of Delenda est Carthago– Carthage must be destroyed – was accomplished.
It was razed to the ground, which was then supposedly salted to prevent crops ever growing there (probably apocryphal, given the amount of salt that would have been required). Mass Carthaginian deaths resulted. How- ever, this treatment was exceptional, for the Roman conquerors tolerated Punic culture. It survived in Spain for at least three centuries and in North Africa and Sardinia for five centuries, to near the end of the Roman Empire.
The Punic upper classes were almost immediately allowed some political autonomy and they began to assimilate, followed later by the lower classes (L ´opez Castro,1995:157–9,210–19).
ethnicity in earlier history
The overall explanation is not hard to find. As Ernest Gellner (1983) and I (1986) noted, most large states of history were the private possession of upper-class elites, whose cultures differed from the cultures of the masses.
In Giddens’s term, these wereclass-dividedsocieties. Ethnic groups existed, but in large societies the elite of one or two of them ruled over the others.
Thus mass cleansing of one people by or in the name of another was uncom- mon. This is more of a hazard of societies where whole peoples share the same collective identities and political claims. Whole peoples arose in two stages. The first came with the emergence of salvation religions preaching that people of all classes and regions had the same soul and the same capacity
for salvation. This democratized the sacred but not the secular realm of so- ciety. Full macro-ethnicity emerged in the second phase, with aspirations for secular democracy, and with it the potential for serious ethnic cleansing.
That mainly pins it down to modernity.
A sense of ethnicity has been very widespread in human history. The basic building blocks of all societies are locality and kinship, and if such ties remain intact over the generations, they generate a shared sense of ethnic community.
Many of the clan and tribal groups studied by anthropologists were such tiny micro-ethnicities. Under the right conditions they might expand to form a smallish people. Larger states in early history were typically composed of many of these smallish ethnic groups. But were the larger units macro- ethnicities? Did the Akkadians, the Hittites, or the Assyrians share a sense of common identity transcending region and class?
Dolukhanov (1994) has summarized what archeologists know of ethnic- ity in the earliest Middle Eastern civilizations. The Neolithic revolution of around8000 bcbrought large and loose “sociocultural networks” of in- teraction connecting many small groups. There was little cultural closure or collective awareness amounting to ethnicity. Only with the emergence of smaller, tighter chiefdoms around 4000–3000 bc did some ethnic self- consciousness emerge. But when these chiefdoms became swallowed up by larger literate civilizations, ethnic boundaries weakened. The ruling elite, priestdom, and merchants might belong to distinct ethnic minorities, alien to the bulk of each local agricultural population. This was so of the Akkadian, Hittite, Assyrian, and Urartuan Empires, which were held together by mili- tary power – not by shared culture, still less by ethnic solidarity. Indeed, since most of the conquerors throughout the region spoke Semitic languages, the written form of one of them, Akkadian, became thelingua francaof elites across the entire Middle East, though it was not spoken by the masses any- where. This was not an era in which ethnicity cemented states.
Social and geographic distance were obviously crucial: how far down and across could a shared sense of ethnic identity spread? The smaller the geo- graphical space and the denser and more egalitarian the population within it, the easier the communication and the more likely a common ethnic sense.
Let us consider the infrastructures of the four sources of social power.
1. Ideological powerwas transmitted mainly through language, literacy, and religion. The common folk of large-scale premodern societies did not speak the same common language, and they were illiterate. Elites might speak and write one or two common official languages, which were not usually native vernaculars. Greek, Latin, and Persian were, like Akkadian, unrelated to most of the empire’s spoken languages.
Ancient religions varied. Some were class-bound. In Mesopotamia reli- gious rituals were conducted in private for the benefit of elites in palaces and temples from which the common people were barred. Syncretic religions ab- sorbed diverse local religions into a loose pantheon of gods at the official
level. It is doubtful that much integration occurred at the popular level, though some cults might diffuse quite widely. Rulers tended to be tolerant of popular and local religions. When Alexander the Great arrived in Memphis, political expediency required that he pay homage to the Egyptian gods. In return, he was accepted as the new pharaoh. The Roman Emperor Augustus was supposedly disgusted at Egyptian sacrifices of animals, but there are ste- lae showing him performing sacrifices. As long as groups respected the offi- cial deities, they could follow whatever religion they liked. Since Christians would not do such obeisance, they were persecuted. Tolerance or syncretism was general across most empires before the rise of monotheistic salvation religions, while Islam remained quite tolerant and Hinduism syncretic. Reli- gions reinforced multi-ethnicity, not macro-ethnicity. Some religious cultures even spanned multiple states, as in Sumer and Greece, and gave a sense of being ethnically Greek or Sumerian to people of most classes (perhaps not to slaves). But this was not very politically relevant. The city-states spent much time fighting each other, and the Greeks united against Persia only when they faced potential Persian hegemony. Otherwise, they were as likely to ally with as against Persia.
Were there no protonational religions in which religion might help cement a macro-ethnic identity? Judaism is usually identified as the main example.
Yahweh did indeed become the god of all the Jews. His worship became the core of the Jewish sense of ethnic identity and of Jewish longings for political freedom. But archeologists and linguists believe this occurred much later than the biblical tradition asserts, after the collapse of the state of Israel and partly because the Persian rulers encouraged subject peoples to develop stable collective identities. Even then, it applied only to Palestine, one part of the land of Israel (Thompson,1992:422). Under the Romans the Jews did constitute an ethnic problem, having become unusually cohesive, resistant, and persecuted. The Armenians constituted a similar case in later history.
But I doubt that there were many cases.
2. Economic powerwas also important. Most early subsistence economies were small-scale, integrating villages and manorial estates within walking distance. The rich could ride over longer distances; those near navigable wa- ter could take goods much further. Traders carried high-value goods over vast distances, but the bulk of the population had local economic horizons.
Cities, especially capital cities, sent out denser networks into their hinter- lands. Irrigation, especially systematic hydraulic economies, provided this for some large rural areas. Capitals and their hinterlands, unusual ecologies, highly effective imperial regimes, and close relations between merchants, ar- tisans, and rulers might generate some integration, though merchants were usually cosmopolitan and transnational in their culture. Early modern Euro- pean countries saw a stirring of national consciousness in the home counties surrounding the capital city – around London and Paris, for example. But across premodern societies we find few highly integrated economies capable
of generating macro-ethnic solidarities. In economic terms, these were class- divided societies.
3. Military power created most of the large states of history. Military service was where ordinary families most felt the weight of the state and where they might commit loyalty to the state. Yet most armies were formed from warrior castes or feudal levies, their allegiance more to their caste or lord than to the state, still less to the nation. Conscription might offer more macro-ethnic cement, especially where citizen-soldiers were the norm, though these usually had to be rich enough to provide their own weapons, armor, and horses. The Assyrian Empire was founded upon highly trained infantrymen recruited from peasants in the heartland of the empire. They probably shared some of the martial culture of their rulers and the spoils of war, generating a sense of being Assyrian across the classes. The empire would then resemble an ethnocracy, the rule of one ethnic group over diverse populations. Rome had something of this in its earlier republican days. But as Assyria and Rome expanded and became fully imperial, their armies were recruited from all the ethnic groups of the empire. It does not seem that their loyalty to the empire became an ethnic identity.
4. Political power is the final factor. Monarchies dominated, generating
“ins” and “outs” at court and in assemblies, usually organized by region, detracting from macro-ethnicity across the realm. The Roman Senate consti- tuted a partial and the Greek polis a major exception, an intense mobilizer of collective commitment among the citizenry of the individual city-state.
In confederations of city-states, like those of Greece, Sumer, and Phoenicia, political infrastructures undercut potential ethnic identities by providing in- tenser local identities.
State administrations did seek to partially homogenize some of their sub- jects. The Chinese bureaucracy was renowned as an integrating device, though it was class-bound, bringing only the provincial gentry into an impe- rial Han identity. The extraordinary longevity and core territorial continu- ity of Chinese empires probably made them exceptional. After centuries of Chinese rule, ordinary peasants seem to have also considered themselves Chinese. Like many other conquerors, Greek and Roman elites often en- forced intermarriages with conquered elites and carried off elite children to the capital and court for an education in Greek or Roman language and cul- ture. Through such policies it is generally said that within a century of Roman rule it became impossible to tell the original ethnic identity of elites, especially among the less civilized conquered peoples. Roman soldiers were also mar- ried off to conquered women and settled in frontier areas. The disappearance of native elites was accompanied by Roman road building, urbanization, a degree of statist economic integration, and standardized military service and taxation. Thus a sense of being Roman spread quite widely among the pop- ulation. From212 adcitizenship became universal, though denuded of real content through the concomitant widening of class differences. Rulers and
ruled were never part of the same ethnic community. As in almost all empires, this was a lateral, aristocratic culture.
the assyrian case
Scholars who say that genocide was also found in the ancient world invari- ably point to the Assyrians. Smith (1997:224) claims that “Assyria engaged in genocide almost annually” (cf. Bell-Fialkoff,1996:7; Rummel,1994:11), which makes us wonder how they could have had any subjects at all. Actually, the Assyrians made the mistake of mistreating the Jews, whose chronicles became sacred texts of the world’s biggest religions. The books of Isaiah and Kings detail their atrocities, and their own bas-reliefs and inscriptions seem to confirm them. The successor Babylonian and Persian regimes were milder.
But in conquering and then in dealing with rebellions, the Assyrians be- haved like other conquerors, if more systematically. Where a state submitted voluntarily at the prospect of having to face the Assyrian army, they were subjected to vassalage, indirect Assyrian rule. They retained political auton- omy, usually under the same native ruler, but paid tribute. The people became one more among many within this multiethnic empire. If vassals rebelled but then submitted quickly, the ruler and his close allies might be killed, replaced with another local, and the level of tribute upped. The fiercer the resistance, the worse the repression. Sustained warfare or rebellion could result in the elimination of the whole ruling clan and the imposition of direct rule, incor- porating the vassal state as a province within the Assyrian Empire proper.
Most incorporated peoples nevertheless survived culturally for a long time.
Persistent rebellions or arduous sieges would occasion exemplary repression amounting at the worst to politicide followed by deportations.
A five-year Babylonian rebellion culminated in a15-month siege that ended in689 bcwhen Sennacherib’s Assyrian Army stormed Babylon. The streets were filled with corpses, the survivors were deported, the city was reduced to ruins. In other Babylonian cities, some leading rebels were tortured and killed by skinning them alive and cutting away their flesh. There was much looting and burning of crops, causing famine deaths. Motives of revenge figured, for Sennacherib had lost his son to Babylonian treachery. But such savagery was also realpolitik – to terrify and deter others. It worked. There were no more rebellions in Babylonian lands until652, when some deportations were then considered sufficient punishment for the next rebellion, as they were after the next one in627. On such occasions, the Assyrians also set up bas-reliefs and inscriptions publicly declaring the level of repression used and the reason for its use, proving the exemplary intent of their actions.
The Jewish King Hezekiah famously realized he had made a big mistake in joining one rebellion. His co-rebels had deserted him to make a deal with Sennacherib. Now isolated in Jerusalem, Hezekiah watched the Assyrian